Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from our colleagues across the Internet — and, occasionally, our own writers. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
The Criterion Collection has announced an incredible October slate, led by a Jacques Tati box set and La dolce vita.
At Salon, Nathan Rabin apologizes for coining the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl:
When I coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in an essay about the movie “Elizabethtown” in 2007, I never could have imagined how that phrase would explode. Describing the film’s adorably daffy love interest played by Kirsten Dunst, I defined the MPDG as a fantasy figure who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
Watch a video on the shades of The Grand Budapest Hotel:
At First Showing, Alex Billington reflects on seeing 2001 in 70mm:
Experiencing 2001 on the big screen with full-on audio is like taking a deep breath, reviewing the history of man in one blink, taking another breath, thinking about what the next steps of evolution of man are and our place in that path, and so on, until we learn that the next major step (in our future) is a big one. And then what? Then, well, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”… Only Clarke and Kubrick know. While our screening came with an intermission, it didn’t need one. 2001 is one complete experience from start to finish, showing us all that today’s man has accomplished in hopes that one day we can lead further out into the cosmos, with another monolith guiding our way. In the meantime, it’s the machines we build and man itself we must fear.
Film Independent on 10 reasons why a production should have a unit publicist.
At The Talkhouse, writer-director David Lowery discusses Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood:
When it was first announced that the title of Linklater’s 12-year project was Boyhood, this is exactly what I thought it was going to be; a luxuriation in the past, in memory, fleeting and florid. That’s what I’d have done with the premise, I’m sure. The Boyhood in my head looked a little bit like the portrait of childhood in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. In fact, when I saw that film and its follow-up, To The Wonder, I suspected that Malick was in the process of creating a cinematic equivalent of Proust’s masterwork; a deep dive into the dream world of his own memory, spread across multiple volumes, fast and free with fact but emotionally true every step of the way. So many friends who’d grown up with brothers reported back to me my own opinion of The Tree of Life, which was that I had never seen my own childhood captured on screen quite so well.